Tag Archives: universities

Elliot Rodger, who killed six and wounded 13 in CA on May 23rd before killing himself.

What many people call random, or senseless, acts of violence are usually neither.

Such words have been used to describe this weekend’s mass shooting at UCSB by Elliot Rodger (pictured above).

Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano–current head of the University of California system–said that a mass shooting in the community around UC Santa Barbara is, “almost the kind of event that’s impossible to prevent and impossible to predict.”

Yet, Rodger’s web video series of detailed threats, his parents’ outreach to police, and his long record of mental health intervention lead one to think that events like this are, in fact, almost assured if there is insufficient intervention first.

Gift of Fear author Gavin de Becker has spent his career preaching that there are reliable indicators of violence.

Unfortunately, this shooting was highly predictable, and could have been prevented had both mental health and crime prevention services been more aggressive.